


Cruel to the Touch

by signalbeam



Category: Persona 3, Persona 4
Genre: Angst, Community: badbadbathhouse, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-13
Updated: 2009-11-13
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:45:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tides and harbors. One that washes over, and one that shelters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cruel to the Touch

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the badbadbathhouse kink meme: _Souji/Fem!P3P Protagonist_.
> 
> Written before the MShe got her fandom-appointed nickname of "Minako." Ah, aquatic fetishes. ... Don't look at me like that.

She always _looks_ as though she should be smiling, but she almost never is. She listens to music a lot. Says that it keeps things from falling over her.

She says a lot of things. She says her name is Ushio, for the tides. Her brother is Minato, and their parents had a thing for oceans and ports. (She says "had" because they're dead now. She mentions it only briefly, and then moves on.) Tides and harbors. One that washes over, and one that shelters. When he asks if she's the elder or the younger, she says that they were twins, in a sense. Almost, but not quite. Hard to explain, she says. They were born of the same egg, but not at the same time. One lives, the other dies.

Like Castor and Pollux, Souji comments, and she smiles a little sadly. Yes and no. It's not the same, but it almost is.

Ushio tells him that her brother is a gatekeeper, but sometimes she is, too; that there once was a great god who swallowed despair and coughed up death; that she, too, holds something inside her, deeply frightening and deeply moving. Souji tells her that in him lives the god of creation, and that his wife is a rotting skeleton who lives in the underground, and he has two children. He knows of death, but has never known it. His death is a death that moves externally, rather than internally.

She asks him what he did with that god that lives inside him.

I saved a town.

I saved a world, she replies offhandedly. But it never meant much to me, anyway. You probably feel better about it than I do.

Tides and changes. Souji gets the impression that she stands in the middle of the ocean, and watches the moon pulling the waters this way and that. She has no reflection except in him, and most people assume he's talking to air. She tells him jokingly that she's death on a holiday. He doesn't laugh because he knows it's true.


End file.
